If they hadn't revealed how they did it, it no one would be able to test their results. Then, the story would have no credibility - they could just as easily have made the whole thing up, and the military would doubtless have claimed they did.

And anyway, while the military might have managed to convince the world that it was all made up, they would have figured out how it was done quickly enough anyway.

Your tinfoil hat is a little too thick. If you RTF leaked text, you'll find that classified has just about nothing to do with the actual incident and everything to do stuff that SHOULD be classified because it gives the enemy insight into our security operations. Believe it or not, security through obscurity has a heck of an impact on the effectiveness of military operations. I know the anti-censorship Slashdot gods will censor me for saying this, but keeping detailed analyses of tactical military operations [slashdot.org] secret in war is a very good thing... unless, of course, you're the type of person that wants to see United States and Iraqi citizens blown to pieces. If that's the case such a person would be happy to see the details I refer to put out in the open; it <strikethrough>is like</strikethrough> IS giving the enemy free and high quality intel.

I dunno about the impact. I expect the iraqi insurgents already have a much better idea of how our security operations work than they can gain through this document. After all they have the opportunity to actually observe this operations and how they react to their attacks.

Observation is one thing, but one thing your eyes don't necessarily tell you is what the opponent thinks about itself and its own tactics. This report now gives out that information to the enemy, and includes information about combat readiness and the perceived effectiveness of the enemy's tactics.

It also gives more extensive information on what the various SOPs (standard operating procedures) have to say about certain sitations than you can gain by observation.

I expect the information was just concealed as a matter of course in case it might contain something of value to the enemy. Still though your overall point is valid. There is no reason the public really needs to know this stuff and it is better safe than sorry with information which might let them kill more soldiers.

Precisely, and since this directly affects some of the units I'd worked with, I fully support the (time-limited*) "censorship" of this kind of information. The idiot that failed to do it effectivly needs some severe discipline.

I've got friends and former coworkers in Iraq, and the release of this kind of information doesn't help them one bit.

(* meaning that after the conflict is over, plus some time, the full report should be (have been) released.)

So would I, considering that the people distributing it are in Italy and therefore not subject to US law. Considering how annoyed the Italian government was about the incident and subsequent cover-up, I doubt that they'll agree to an extradition.

The rumor is that he is somewhere just outside of Bagdad airport. While he is physically in US custody he is technically in the legal custody of the Iraqi government. He won't be tried under US or international law. He will be tried under Iraqi law. So what were you saying?

With all due respect, USA had nothing to do in Iraq, it wasn't threatened by it and it knew that it poses no danger. Also, at the current stage there are open admissions that intelligence data was twisted for political needs not to represent actual situations.

How often do you shoot your neighbors just because they might be holding a gun and planning to shoot you? And claim that this was just a self-defense out of necessity? Try it out! It works! It's the american way, after all!

The fact that USA tries to enforce its laws across the world is NOT acceptable, regardless of what your comment shows you think. This just isn't how the law is supposed to work.

There are cultures where murder is a very encouraged and normal (if not mandatory) response to a case if someone rapes your daughter (in example).

There are cultures where there are no needs for cops, because the justice is enforced by everyone and any criminal risk loosing not only his position in society, but home and friends too.

You just might have heard that there are cultures where the LAW is defined and exact and don't depends on 15 tomes of decisions of similar cases or your capabilities to appear as a victim of society to the jurors.

I'm not saying that Sadam Hussein wasn't a criminal. Yes, he was, he was involved in war crimes, genocide, just plain power stretching around and enforced really harsh means to silence the opposition, but this wasn't the USA's business. For heaven's sake, Iraq even isn't a border country for the USA, what would add some credibility to the "World Cop" role it postulates.

In short: US law is law that is (and should be) enforced only in USA. One step across the border - and you have a different set of laws. And that's how it should stay - each culture deciding itself on the laws it needs and the enforcement methods it should use.

There is a really, really big difference between McJunkie Girl (violently raped at each of last three parties she attended and happy for that) and the wife of some Taliban Man (violently beaten up each evening, and happy for that). And laws are made to reflect that.

"Guantanomo Bay is a US military base, therefore it is subject to US laws."

No, in fact it is rented from Cuba [findlaw.com] (even though they refuse the payment) and the U.S. government's position is that it is therefore foreign soil and not subject to U.S. laws or Constitution.

"They were captured in disguise and according to the laws of warfare could be summarily executed as spies."

While it's nice to refer to what the actual laws and interpretations allow, you miss the most important point: they have no due process rights. As you state, they have no Geneva Convention protection, even though they were captured as "the enemy" in a war. They are also not protected by the U.S. Constitution (see above link) because they are considered on foreign soil, even though they were captured by Americans, are being held by Americans, and are on an American base. In short, they have no protected rights for due process that civilized nations provide to everyone including war criminals, enemy soldiers, and civilian criminals.

Some people may not care. After all, these are terrorists, right? Well, how do we know? Is the military infallable? Is every accused person guilty? That's what due process is for. Is this not the "absolute power" behaviour that pissed off American's enough to create the U.S. in the first place, and provide such basic protections to all people?

Please, show me the section of the constitution that says "The preceding stuff doesn't apply when the US government is acting abroad, and the victims of its actions are foreigners."

Everyone asserts that the US constitution doesn't apply overseas, but I don't see anything that would imply that in the constitution itself - it's all along the lines of, "Congress shall not do X."

Not "Congress shall not do X, except to brown-skinned furriners with funny outfits and long beards," or "Congress shall not do X in any place where reporters might see it done," or "Congress shall not do X unless they first convince a majority of voting Americans that it's OK."

After all, these are terrorists, right? Well, how do we know? Is the military infallable? Is every accused person guilty?

In fact we know with as much certainty as we know anything that some of the 500 people incarcerated in Guantanomo Bay are not terrorists. Simple statistics is all that is required to prove this. We know that the cops sometimes arrest the wrong person, and that for that reason we have courts. And we know that sometimes courts convict the wrong people, and for that reason we don't have the death penalty (oops, sorry, you guys in the U.S. do, don't you?)

We also know that the Guantanomo detainees were captured in an environment very much subject to "the fog of war", which gets used as an excuse every time the U.S. military fucks up and kills a few Canadians.

Given all this, it is extremely doubtful that the error rate in accusations of terrorism is less than 1%. If it is 1%, then on average we would expect 5 innocent people to be incarcerated in Gauntanomo Bay with no rights. A Poisson distribution with a mean of 5 has P(0) = 0.0067, so there is a 99.3% chance that there is at least one innocent in Gauntanomo Bay, even under these extremely conservative assumptions.

Given that the U.S. military tribunals that are passing judgment on the detainees believe that wearing a Casio watch constitutes evidence of terrorism [ap.org] it is pretty clear that the rate of incarceration of innocents is much higher than this. It is also worth noting that the tribunal does not even get the model of the watch correct--the F91 does not have a compass. It makes one wonder what other mistakes they have made in the evidence that still remains classified.

You may be underestimating the horror of imprisoning the people there. Watch The Power of Nightmares [informatio...house.info] by BBC. It looks weird, but it really seems that most of the terrorist threat was made up. It's very likely that 90-95% of all people in Guantanamo Bay are innocent. Do you know how flimsy the evidence was [blogspot.com] in those few cases of suspected terrorists caught on the US soil?

The whole thing is unjustified. If we ignore the US government propaganda for a second, the whole campaign was simply an act of unprovoked irrational aggression in violation of international laws. As Viggo Mortensen said about America commenting on parallels between war in Iraq and LOTR, "We are the evil guys".

You're just a repressed coincidence theorist. Let's see: a group of high government officials go out of power with the change in party control. They publish a detailed plan for invading Iraq for unilateral strategic reasons, noting that without other justification, they'll need a "Pearl Harbor" scale event to invade. A decade later, they return to their old offices when their party retakes the White House. A few months later, a Pearl Harbor scale event occurs. The officials claim falsely that the event is connected to Iraq, and invade.

That's not very complicated. Every part is public knowledge all along. It is deluded people like you, who won't accept the truth, who enable the outrageous acts of these evil officials. Your kind of zombie is easy to identify: you can't dispute the facts, or the simple logic, so you attack the messenger with rhetoric and extreme exaggeration. I hope you're enjoying Bush's America, composed of lies, hatred, war, poverty, and rapid decline. Maybe you'll get a date with one of the Bush twins!

If I see my neighbor continuously beating his wife and his wife is incapable of getting away from him and I've tried other measures, I'm gonna go over and kick his ass and make sure he never goes near her again.

Of course if he hasn't beaten his wife in a few years, and you just decide one night that you're going to go over and burn his house down to the ground with his family still inside, it might not seem so noble.

Yeah, Hussein was a sadistic bastard and a lousy leader who did some atrocious things in the past. Nobody is sorry to see him gone. The Iragis are better off today than they were 5 years ago. None of that justifies unilaterally invading a soveriegn nation that presents no immediate threat to anyone.

While that all could be written off as simply bad foreign policy, the fact that we pulled military and intelligence resources off of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to accomplish it makes it especially galling. Where is Osama? The guy who planned an attack on american soil that slaughtered thousands of civilians? Why were we taking satellites off of Tora Bora and putting them on Baghdad? Why were we pulling the CIA & Special Forces teams out of Afghanistan so that they could go to Iraq and target facilities there? Hussein wasn't going anywhere, and he wasn't doing anything that demanded our immediate attention.

No matter how successful Iraq turns out to be, when Osama carries off another attack on American soil, there are going to be a lot of people asking "why the hell didn't we catch this guy the first time around?"

I suppose it would't be too hard to twist the DMCA into "protecting" hidden text as a security/DRM mechanism and calling this action "circumvention". The main problem is that our technology has outgrown 90% of the human race. Another example of this kind of thinking is on the moblog site, yafro.com. There are tons of women who post nude photos of themselves in their accounts. Much like Slashdot, there is a friends/foes type system. If you and another person are mutually in a friend relation, then you can see their "locked" pictures. So... when a few jackasses decided to mutually friend some of the Yafro women, take their locked photos and post them in a public forum on Yafro (a club), these women flipped out. They griped about how they were entitled to their privacy and it had been violated. They're right as far as ethics and respect go. But, this is the internet. Anything you place on it can't be expected to be private or protected in any fashion. If someone wants the info bad enough, they are going to get it.

It's illegal to knowingly download classified docs, I trust you will do the right thing.
I, for one, will do my duty as a citizen and read the document. Living in a state in europe, I will look if there is any information in it that might be vital to my countries existance and then do the right thing - which might even include distributing the document to others.

Since when is breaking the law morally wrong? The reason the US has guns is so that its citizents can break unjust laws and defent themselves from an unreasonable government. There is nothing "wrong" with breaking the law, and I wish peopld would start realizing that.

Treason, or perhaps more accurately, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, including financial backing, is also illegal.

Can you site a single case where there has been a treason conviction for financial contributions? Treason is meant to be a serious crime. Aid and comfort is meant to be things like a non combatant military role (logistics officer, army engineer, navagational officer) in an army in active shooting war with the US. That's far short of a guy who throws a couple bucks at a cause you disagree with.

To even stand a chance of a treason conviction you would have to be a sworn member of Al Quida involved in an operation against the United States. Congress meanwhile has not declared war so even given this I'm not so sure you couldn't beat a treason conviction.

Funny how the right loves to talk about treason but they have yet to actually try one of their "XYZ committed treason" people (Jane Fonda and John Walker Lindh being classic examples) because they know damn well the courts would reaffirm a very high standard for treason.

Oh, and for those not clued in, trying to "run" a checkpoint at 60MPH when it is manned by guys with guns gets you shot at, often a lot.

Well you've immediately assumed the US party line is the truth. The Italians are claiming a slow approach (30mph), that all necessary contacts with the US for safe passage were made, the driver stopped immediately when a light flashed 10m away but at the same time shots were fired into car for 10-15 seconds. Just wanted to clear that up for anyone who didn't RTFA, but did read your post.
A quick overview here [bbc.co.uk].

Interesting the the people that posted this don't point out any smoking guns. It's mildly interesting that they were able to thwart the ridiculously inane classified protections, but it's telling that they didn't find anything that further incriminated the U.S. service personnel.

It's unfortunate but if you choose to negotiate with kidnappers (and thereby encourage more kidnapping) and further don't tell someone who's subject to daily suicide car bombs that you're going to be speeding down a road that is infamous for daily suicide car bombs, is it any surprise this happened?

Should I expect less if I make jerky motions into my pockets when a police officer pulls me over for a routine traffic accident?

Interesting the the people that posted this don't point out any smoking guns. It's mildly interesting that they were able to thwart the ridiculously inane classified protections, but it's telling that they didn't find anything that further incriminated the U.S. service personnel.

It's better that the submitter didn't stuff his/her own opinions into the story. I, for one, don't really care for their views in the summary itself, that's what the comments are for.

Neither do I care for any BS political conclusions derived by the submitter. None of that belongs in the story, all this can stick in the discussion section. This summary makes the most sense I've seen in a long time:) It gives you the facts while leaving the opinions to the READERS.

It's unfortunate but if you choose to negotiate with kidnappers (and thereby encourage more kidnapping) and further don't tell someone who's subject to daily suicide car bombs that you're going to be speeding down a road that is infamous for daily suicide car bombs, is it any surprise this happened?

I think this falls under the same category as the famous Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy:

"I think a good gift for the President would be a chocolate revolver. And since he's so busy, you'd probably have to run up to him real quick and hand it to him."

As an american living in Italy, we've seen a lot of coverage of this over here.

The Italians involved said they weren't speeding. The Americans said the vehicle was travelling too quickly.

I think anyone, italian or american, can figure out the reason for this disagreement by watching a cowering family of american tourists trying to cross the street in Rome or any other large italian city. Some people obviously have different ideas about what 'fast' or 'dangerous' driving is.

I like Italy in many ways, but sometimes I really have to agree with Bill Bryson's "never should have let the Italians in on the invention of the automobile" sometimes!

Tried to murder her??? After the incident took place the same US soldiers applied some first aid to her and then drove her to a hospital to be treated for shock. I have never heard of a criminal in the U.S. that was intending to murder someone taking that same person to the hospital after the attempt but maybe criminals are different in Italy.

It's not necessary for the soldiers to knowingly be on a mission to murder her. If someone high up wanted Sgrena dead, they might have "forgotten" to tell the chek-point soldiers about the incoming car, expecting all of the occupants would have been killed by the soldiers. When the soldiers realised it was no suicide missions, they rescued the survivors from the wreck.

You are kidding, right? I think Sgrena is flattering herself a bit much if she really thinks the US wanted her dead - someone that up to that point was as far as the US was concerned still a hostage. The Italians *did not* tell the US that they were coming, with their just freed hostage. I also find it interesting that she claims the car was riddled with 400 rounds, which would make me ask if that were really the case, why is she still alive?

The italians also claimed they were driving just 30mph, though satellite pics [yahoo.com] indicates otherwise.

Sgrena also claimed that was able to pickup handfuls of bullets [abc.net.au] off of the seats of her car, supporting her claim of 400 rounds fired. Anyone who knows anything about ballistics knows bullets do not pass through one side of a car and then land harmlessly on the seat. They would either embed themselves in the opposite side of the vehicle, or pass all the way through. They would also probably be way too hot to touch.

She also at one point claimed to have been shot with a 4 inch tank round [bellaciao.org]. People who are shot by 4" rounds do not live to talk about it.

I think the true story here is that Sgrena didn't like the US before this happened, and is inclined to try and paint by any means the US as the responsible party here.

Oh, get real. It's difficult to know what really happened, and whether the soldiers made a mistake or whether it was simply a terrible tragedy, but if the soldiers had wanted that woman dead, there would be nothing left of her, the car, or any of the other occupants besides a smoking crater.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence".

Think about things for a second. If the US wanted her dead, then she would not have been killed at a checkpoint by a couple of grunt marines. The US would have sent commandos, probably masquerading up as Iraqis or some other group. Such a black op would not have been entrusted to a couple of grunts manning a checkpoint.

Never mind that the question of what would the US have to gain by killing her after her release.

This entire situation is nothing more than what it looks like - a couple of poorly trained

There might actually have been respectable and perhaps important reasons for redacting some of that information.
Not that it matters now, but it seems a bit imprudent to fervishly publicize information about troops that could have serious ramifications for them.

The US government has for a long time, and this adiminstration in particular, classified things reflexively, whether secrecy was actually required or not.

In many ways it'll be scarier if the redactions show nothing of interest at all: not protecting anybody's privacy or any actual secrets. (A quick scan suggests exactly that.) It leaves open the question, "Why is the government keeping that information secret? Why is the government keeping so much information secret?"

There are many things that people would like to know to keep an eye on their government. Not all of that information should be released, for national security reasons, but it's always been the government who makes that decision. This lack of a check on the power of government makes people increasingly nervous as crimes (e.g. Abu Ghraib) are discovered anyway.

Most people in government over-classify things in order to protect their jobs. It's not a crime to overclassify; it's a big crime to release national security info, even accidentally. That's understandable, but a failure to release information that people are allowed to know makes it extremely difficult to check up on what the government does and whether it is still acting in our interest.

So yeah, maybe this is a bad thing. Maybe this is a release of national security information and lives may be lost. Or maybe it's laziness, somebody redacting because it's easier than checking on whether or not it was OK to release. Now we'll find out, and perhaps gain some broader insight.

Sure, it looks like they are classifying stuff just to classify it. But if you knew anything about how intelligence gathering works, you would know why they are doing it. Now that computers are as fast as they are, and the amount of data floating around out there, it's surprisingly easy to put two and two together, and gather intelligence that can be harmful. Here's a realworld example of exactly what I am talking about: Paul Graham on PR [slashdot.org] talks about how anyone can track down which companies are controlling what the press says, and making trends happen by causing people to believe they already are happening. Now imagine if you were trained to find little nuggets of info like that! That's what they are trying to prevent. It only takes one slip-up to create a critical vulnerability, exposing a position or future activity. So give 'em a break.

bush is even having things classified even after they have been testified to before congress, or been discussed on 60 minutes.Of course he hasn't gone as far as Reagan who wanted to prosecute them for their testimony before congress even though the info was not classified at the time of the testimony.

The bush administration has leaked classified info when it serves their purposes. Remember Valerie Plame? She was setting up a sting to bust nuclear weapon smugglers.

Sometimes it is in the national interest to leak. Remember when Reagan classified the reports of fraud and waste? Those leaks were in our national interest whereas keeping it classified was not. He made a public show of fighting waste and fraud, but behind the scenes he was not, but at least the issue was before the public eye.

Edmunds is now fighting to have her info heard before congress. Her info points to complacency before and after 9-11. they have classified her info so much she can't even tell congress.

I was an Army spook, I know the arguments. Not everything should be declassified, but waste, fraud, treason should be declassified. The Valerie Plame leak was treason in my opinion.

This is not the first time they have made this type of mistake. Embarrassing them in this way can only make them be more security conscious. Security is about the small things.

If I had to choose between having Bushie in the White House and Saddam Hussein in the White House, I'd pick Saddam without even thinking twice.

The words "fucking moron" come immediately to mind--and I'm not talking about Bush. When you can point at the mass graves in Alabama and thousands of dead Canadians killed by Sarin and other chemical nasties then maybe, just maybe, you can do an apples to apples comparison there.

And I say this as someone who thinks Bush has been an unmitigated disaster for our nation, opposed going into Iraq, thinks the legislators who voted for PATRIOT should be hanged as traitors, and who voted against Bush last November.

Here, Here
Not only that, but the classified information that is opened up can be whatever 'They' wish it to be. Since the hidden information is not 'Officially' released. It's interesting that it only tends to reinforce the US position.
Although the Intelligence Community in the US has gotten a bad rap lately, they are not this stupid to do this by accident.

Calipari, jumps the omissis of the AmericansOn Internet the relationship in its interezza can be read. The Power of attorney of Rome will acquire the new document like open source

INSTRUMENTSVERSION STAMPABILEThe READ PIU'IT SENDES THIS ARTICLEThe USA relationship with omissis (AP)ROME - They are omissis "only virtual", than they can be gone around with simple clic, those lies in wait for to the USA relationship on the dead women of Nicholas Calipari, published friday, and that they would have had to hide names, procedures and others you leave classified. Pecette black that filled up the 45 the pages of the document answered to obvious reasons of inner emergency, a way in order protect the anonymity of the marines been involved in the "tragic incident" of 4 March, when Calipari found the dead women for "fire friend" on the road for the airport of Bagdad.

Sin but that the USA commando had not made the accounts with the "copy and glue", that concurs to read the relationship in its interezza, without censorships. How? E' sufficient to open the document it originates them with the version reader of Acrobat, to select all the text and to make a copy and glue on Word or whichever editor. Or, easier anchor, to open rows "pdf" originates them, to cliccare on "Saves come..." and to choose a whichever various format from the "pdf" (always Word, as an example). A simplest technical operation that is in a position to executing anyone has a connected computer to Internet.

Between the parts of the relationship covered the military secret USA there is as an example the paragraph with the names of the members of the patrol who has talked nonsense against the car of Calipari, or the identity of the third man (an Italian agent) to the guide of the car with Giuliana Sgrena and Calipari, and still the understood one it with the procedures of I engage of the check point. Emergency "around to John Negroponte emerges also the operation" and the difficulties of that evening in the particular chain of commando americana.Tutti, with to many others, that they are hour becomes you of public dominion and that the power of attorney of Rome that it inquires on the Calipari homicide will acquire. It is how much is learned in atmospheres investigated you of Clodio Large square. The acquisition procedure is that one that the enquirers define of the so-called opened sources, that is news of interest for the judicial authority that but does not have some trial-like valence.

...are scary. This, and numerous other pdf-related security breaches which happened (remember the blacked-out pdf that was modified to reveal its contents?) are all the more reason for MS pushing its software everywhere by declaring competing software are not as secure as theirs. Doesn't matter if the security breach originated from the user's lack of understanding of the most basic security concepts.

My fear is that knee-jerk reactions to incident like this someday could be as extreme as invoking the DMCA against copy and paste. That, and further control from MS for information in the government due to the inherent "security" of MS stuff. It's unimaginable that a corporation can be more powerful than the government, but more incidents like this and this will happen.

From scanning through the report I can only conclude that it was an accident. The US soldiers where poorly trained for the mission, and the driver of the car wasn't paying enough attention to his surroundings.

Tragic yes, but nothing more (assuming the italians agree with the description of the events of course, people can always lie)

The US Military uses VOIP? And it failed during this incident? Why would they use technology that is hardly the most reliable to confer on the battlefield. Isn't that a little dangerous? I wouldn't trust my life to VOIP, no matter how secure/reliable a military network was.

It appears that this all boils down to a blame game - the US wants to defend its soldiers and assign blame to the Italians for not sharing information, whereas the Italians want the American soldiers held responsible for what is, essentially, a tragic circumstance in a war zone.

The Italians in the car weren't expecting a roadblock at that location, and the Americans didn't know about the rescue operation that was in progress...

This is 100% of a case of people not being properly trained and not following security procedures.

Secret data must be stored only on computers cleared for secret processing. Secret documents can only be downgraded to unclassified by deletion of the text followed by exporting it to plain ASCII text only.

Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, PDFs, etc cannot ever be transfered from a secret computer to an unclassified computer even if the original file is unclassified. The only allowable format is human readable text. Basically, if you can't read it in notepad, you cannot copy it from a classified computer to an unclassified computer.

These are the rules, unfortunately not everyone follows them (convenience) or is properly trained.

The rules actually vary a bit from system to system but it is possible to get approval to export unclassified word documents and PDF documents from a classified system if the appropriate procedures are used.
In this case this could be:
a hoax or,
it could be that the proper procedures were not followed or,
it could be an intentional leak.
Nothing special about those possibilities since they pretty much are the same possibilities with any release of information like this.
Check out the response in the annotated NISSPOM Chapter 8 (available within http://www.dss.mil/infoas/index.htm [dss.mil]) which has embedded Q&A from an industrial security letter (which carry essentially the same weight as NISSPOM itself)
page 12 of the PDF says

36. Issue: Paragraphs 8-306b and 8-310b discuss the "trusted download" process where electronic files and/or media can be created at a classification level lower than the accreditation level of the IS without going into sufficient detail of the review process or program. Because of the many different vendor platforms and applications (e.g., word processing, database, electronic mail, spreadsheets) additional guidance is needed.

Answer: Every vendor's platform and application are unique and each requires a thorough review by the ISSM and DSS before they can be used to create classified or unclassified files and/or media. DSS has developed a "standard" for the trusted download process that can be found at http://www.dss.mil/infoas/index.htm [dss.mil]. If the ISSM is unable to implement the DSS "standard," the SSP must include a description of how and why the contractor has deviated from the standard under the vulnerability-reporting requirement of paragraph 8-610a(1)(c). If the ISSM is unable to provide any acceptable countermeasure to mitigate this vulnerability, the ISSM must notify and get acceptance from the GCA/data owner of the additional risk.

Kids, I know you want your people back--I'm sorry, but your hostages are already dead. Mourn for them, but don't pay off their kidnappers. That's stupid. That's Reagan-stupid. Ten million bucks buys a lot more kidnappings and suicide bombs.

Does anybody have a clue what software they used to generate those PDFs? I am curious how various software treats such stuff in PDFs... I mean f.e. it is obvious that simple printout to PDF converter will erease any such hidden data, but what with f.e. OpenOffice.org export function or various other utilities?

It's dark, you're travelling on a dangerous road known for ambushes. You can't see the huddled shapes lurking in the darkness behind their vehicles. Suddenly a floodlight paints your vehicle. You can't see anything but the floodlight and shots are fired. American checkpoint or insurgent ambush? Decide quickly, because you'll be killed if you stop and it's insurgents, and you be killed if you don't stop immediately and it's the Americans.

American checkpoints in Iraq are not well-lit traffic-coned "approach the gate and the waving officer slowly" affairs. They block the road at the best place to kill oncomers and hide behind their barriers. It's often the worst place for approaching vehicles to see the roadblock until you're on top of it. By then, they start firing "warning shots" in the general direction of (if not into) your vehicle. It doesn't always play out like that, but dozens of dead Iraqi families can't be wrong...

It's really sad to see this much "nerds" falling into the easiest route from point a to b without even considering any other possibilities.

How about this: They don't have a clue on how to get to the heads of the insurgency, thus they can't send them bad information, in which case they "do an error that looks legit" and broadcast it abroad knowing every news agency and curious person on the planet will pick it up.

Disinformation is a powerful thing. and even if the troops movements and all kind of information is included in the text, maybe there's one point there that they know that could be set up as a trap or whatever.

I mean, it's easy to jump to conclusions that humanity is stupid because someone revealed information, and the military knows nothing about the evil.DOC format, I'd tend to think that seeing how US military failed in terms of preparation and casulties in Irak, but this would be also too big (someone would get charged for something really huge, and normally someone having access to this type of document as source to encode them, isn't a total idiot and has been checked up. Plus, there's surely a procedure on how to make documents and etc. there).

So the point is, I could be wrong, the gun-jumpers could be wrong, but one thing is right; there are ALWAYS other possible alternatives to something obvious, especially when it's military or political. A forum like this is not to say "ahh bad bad bad" and see 500 messages of bitching on bad bad bad, but rather to promote a certain level of dicussion and intelligible arguments.

I keep telling people it doesn't matter who Bush nominates as the U.S. top U.N. diplomat. You might as well approve John Bolton because Bolton's style is what Bush uses already. If Bolton doesn't get approved Bush will probably appoint Ann Coulter or some other more devisive figure. Let's be seriuos, this is the same "uniter" who re-nominated the 10 justices the Democrats thought were to conservative. Bush loves to give people the finger.

The world hates George Bush and the Republicans because

The Republicans and George Bush hate and have no respect for the rest of the world. The Republicans have such friendly ideas as to disband the U.N.; have the U.S. completely withdraw from the U.N.; move the U.N. headquarters out of NYC;
make the U.N. a U.S.A. puppet (John Bolton is for the latter).

As the sayin goes, with friends like these who needs enemies?

You just have to look at how George Bush treats fellow Americans called Democrats to understand the level of contempt and hate that exists for the outside world as well. As an American, if you want to go to a George Bush Town Hall meeting you have to sign a paper of loyalty. You have to ask yourself why that is?

In my opinion the bigger story here was how the U.S. handled diplomacy. Obviously the answer is poorly, arrogantly and with a strong middle finger salute to the Italians. This is no different then the diplomacy of Fox News, AM Hate Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Laura Ingram and all the rest of the right wing giving their fellow Americans called Democrats the finger 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. Ultimately all the hatred and contempt the right heaps on the left will end in violence.

Whoever Bush appoints to the U.N. will be expected to behave similarly; waive arrogantly a strong John Bolton middle finger salute to the rest of the world as well.

I don't care about any political bearings of any of the players. Only of those involved and their saftey.

All of this happened in the blink of an eye. That can be agreed on. It is also a shame and that can be agreed on too.

Honestly you do NOT mess around in a situation like this. As a soldier you can't just say "Oh look at that speeding car lets see what they want". You have to take action and it sounds to me like procedure was followed to the best of ability.

Communication could have been better.The driver could have been smarter.The vehicles shouldn't have been moved. Though I'm glad they were as more could have died.

That can be agreed on. Well no cause it doesn't matter because Americans are at fault automatically.

Just think about this. She was released. Why the need for any urgency?

The one thing I think everyone missed is this:

Sgrena claimed that her kidnappers, just before releasing her, had warned her that the American forces would be a danger to her.

Perhaps she had some form of Stockholm Syndrome and caused the driver to react differently when the warning shots happened?

Why on earth would the Americans want to intentionally harm her? Oh that's right the kidnappers said so so it must be true.

If that is true why then was medical treatment given to her and those involved as a priority over all else?

Anyway...

You know people are nitpicking when you read things like:

Giuliana Sgrena was hit, in the shoulder according to the U.S. version, but in an upper limb, according to Italian journalists.

So they already have an axe to grind. Eventually the truth will come out though no one will want to hear it. Both sides were at fault.

The 1-76 TOC had two means of communicating with 4th Brigade, its higher headquarters: Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP)2 and FM. The 1-76 FA Battle Captain was using only VOIP to communicate with 1-69 IN, but experienced problems with VOIP, therefore losing its only communication link with 1-69 IN, other than going through 4th Brigade. (Annex 97C). As a result, the Battle Captain was unable to pass updated information about the blocking mission either directly to 1-69 IN, or to 4th Brigade. He did not attempt to contact 4th Brigade via FM communications. (Annex 63C).

and

(U) Mr. Carpani told Sergeant First Class Feliciano who Ms. Sgrena was and that he was trying to get to the airport. He told Sergeant First Class Feliciano that he heard shots from somewhere, and that he panicked and started speeding, trying to get to the airport as quickly as possible. Mr. Carpani further told Sergeant First Class Feliciano that he continued to speed down the ramp, and that he was in a hurry to get to the airport. (Annexes 91C, 136C).

So it all came down to two issues.

(1) Failure to communicate. The car wasn't where it should be, wasn't informed of what was waiting ahead of them, gave its position but that information was not forwarded to the roadblock, so they were not expecting them.

(2) The driver then risked the lives of everyone in the vehicle by reacting with very bad judgement when he arrived at the roadblock. (accelerating the vehicle after he was spotlighted, laserpointered, and heard the warning shots)

Bad decisions by the driver of the vehicle, amplified by failure to communicate.

The government did the initial distribution. It just did it unintentionally. Showing how the government did, in-fact, distribute the material itself is certainly not completely free of legal implications, but it is not the same as leaking the classified information.
The main questions are:
1) Is it legal to show how to decipher a public transmission of the government to gain more data than intended (no matter how stupid the cypher is).
I believe the answer to that question is an emphatic, "no it is illegal", despite what most of us, as technologically literate human beings see as a ton of fun.
2) Should this specific instance of hidden text be considered an encrypted message. Is a message written in Pig Latin considered encrypted? On the other hand, where do we draw the line on how hard an encryption scheme must be to crack before it's considered breaking governmental encryption.
(Fellow geeks, please hold off on the comments saying "This is not truly an encrypted message" as for all intents and purposes, this message was unable to be viewed in its intended distribution format.)
Tell me what you think!
I'm not sure myself.

Uh... just so you know, the message isn't hidden from blind people. Or anyone with a screenreader, for that matter. I like to have my computer read documents aloud to me as I do other things. My screenreader read all of the "classified" portions without the least bit of trouble. It even prefaced them with the word "Unclassified" on each page.

Now, it could be argued that I was using it in an unintended way, but what of blind people? Are they simply to be disallowed the right to read things that our government distributes, for fear that they might hear something classified? Are they to be disallowed the ability to discuss information that they have access to and have no reason to believe is classified? In fact, they would have every reason to believe that it's unclassified since the screenreader would say "Unclassified" at the top of each page.

I really fail to see how portions of a document that a screenreader could read with no modification could be considered "unable to be viewed in its intended distribution format".

Any US citizen has not violated fundamental clearance issues by reading it (however, OpSec provides that this information should only be available on a need to know basis). Non-US Citizens outside the US aren't covered by US law in the same way.The position of Non-US nationals in the US is probably different.I am neither a Lawyer nor a US Citizen and I possess no US Security Clearance.

According to the Italian version of the event, they weren't speeding through the checkpoint, nor were they given any warning that there was a checkpoint up ahead (no lights, signs, or soldiers waving them down).

Well, according to Sgrena, the car was fired upon by a tank. Or possibly several hundred rounds of machine-gun fire. She's made both claims.

Calipari was, apparently, experienced in this sort of thing, making it strange that this happened. It's clear that the U.S. forces weren't properly informed of the Italian actions, but even so, he should have known how to deal with a roadblock.

Personally I have no clear opinions on the Calipari case, because in this cases all information that slips to civilians is of course filtered and in the best case only a pale approximation of the truth. There is too much truly classified information about this, like about anything relating to a war. Truth will perhaps eventually arise, but it's matter of years.

About illegality/irresponsability, well, you have to question not me nor CmdrTaco integrity, but the journalistic integrity of all major Italian media. All sites of prominent Italian newspapers and even Italian national television broadcast service are highlighting this scoop with great fanfare. The link to the unclassified document comes from and is hosted by the Corriere della Sera website, the major Italian newspaper.

So it's plain silly to think/. should have silenced this. If it wasn't me, it would have been someone else to post this.

Moreover someone already pointed out in comments that is better for people that may risk something by this disclosure to know they risk something. The vulnerability was there. It should have been an advantage for someone if it was secret. Being that much publicized, such info it is not an advantage for any enemy more.

"If it was me, I would have shot the car. It was clearly speeding towards their position."It was? That's what not surprisingly those who shot claim, however I have seen no prove of that claim yet, and the other side is telling a different story.

"The driver was not paying attention."He wasn't? Proof? And of course, see comment above.

"He had a spotlight and a laser pointer shined on them."He did? Proof? And of course, see comment above.

"They supposedly had the windows down in the car to hear for threats."T

Satellite photos with time differentials show that the car *must* have been going an average of 60+ mph to cover the distance it had covered between photos. Some of the papers were leaving that bit out of their stories (LA Times for example).

You should read more about foreigners in Iraq. They/all/ go speeding around as fast as possible over the iraqi roads. It's SOP: to do anything else would be suicide. Read up on the security contractors, or how the journalists go around (when they do get out of their hotels)...hell, driving around at breakneck speeds is SOP for american soldiers, fer crying out loud!

The real question is why did a tank-ish thing, which was situated btween two checkpoints and behind a curve without a LOS on the first checkpoint fire at a van which had already passed them (and, coincidentally, the first checkpoint)?

.I'm not American, I'm Canadian, and I'm saying you are a great example of the total idiocy that *many* people in all countries of this world display. (Including a few co-workers of mine.)

You've been watching way too much TV - it's rare that there's "absolute proof". Are you asking for every single person in the world to carry around running video camera's 24 hours a day? That's the only way you can expect "absolute proof"?

When it comes right down to it, you end up with 10 witnesses for the defence - and 3 witnesses for the "procecution". What you see in the document is the testimony. Solider A says that person B did this, person C said that, etc etc.

As far as I am concerned, with 1 of the 3 Italian witnesses being a virulent anti-American/anti-war zealot, and the other 2 having TONS of reasons to cover up their own stupidity and non-performance of their job, I believe the other 10 witnesses.

But nooooo, you need "absolute proof". And the fact that something bad happened can't possibly be because one excited Italian secret agent hurrying to get his biggest triumph in years to the airport while talking on the phone while listening to a conversation in the back seat - made a mistake. Nooo, it's big ass conspiracy, the entire US Army was out to get them, all the soldiers at the checkpoint were out to committ cold blooded murder.

Get a fucking clue.

(Don't get me wrong. There are other situations where someone did something clearly wrong, and for some reason the US Military justice system totally failed to do the right thing. The shooting of the wounded prisoner in Fallujah is one example. And American's aren't alone in having bad apples in their ranks or young guys who make really bad/stupid mistakes. But that doesn't mean that there's *always* something rotten going on.)

Oh, I dunno. Maybe the fact that the U.S. released satellite images showing the position of the car which where taken with a known time differential combined with basic algebra means the approximate speed of the car can easily be determined. Maybe it was about 10 seconds from impacting the soldiers and was speeding means the car was a reasonable threat. You'd trust the "opinion" of a rabid anti-American communist about the speed of the car and behavior fo the driver wrt the roadblock?

I really hate the way that Americans often seem to lose their sanity the minute the word "communist" is mentioned, since it seems like such a knee jerk reflex, especially since the cold war ended around 15 years ago. However, I think that Sgrena's attitude toward the US was probably not the most favourable, as I can't imagine a European communist paper employing a giddy yay america type person. While communist papers and parties in Europe are dinosaurs, as not many are interested in them, I think that the general view of the US in Europe has nothing to do with being communist or not.

Living here myself, I simply see European attitudes as being one's of suspicion and disbelief at the rhetoric and actions of the current US government.

However, a lot of Europeans are just as supicious of their own governments as these are just as opaque in the way they do things.

She's a communist, she's written extensively for Il Manifesto [ilmanifesto.it] and has made a lot of statements underlining her political affiliation & beliefs.

That said, there's nothing wrong with being a leftist, and it's irrelevant to this case (except that, of course, she's using her platform & beliefs to put a pretty massive spin on things.) Saying "the communist reporter" is similar to stating "the black assailant."

In this case it's just a horrible, possibly avoidable tragedy and I'm sure everyone involved really really sorry it happened, not that that helps.

As for the idiots saying things like "if soldiers don't want to get blown up, they should stay the f*** out of Iraq", that's about as base, nonsensical, ill-informed and sad an attitude as I can think of, and simply not deserving of a response.